Cherrygrove City was much larger than in the gameboy games, but it was still clear that there should be even larger cities in MAO. Yet, most players lingered here, even though teams or solo players set off every day to try and reach Violet City and the first gym leader. Rumors had it, and the digital news shown in PokémonCenters daily showed, that Violet City had many more opportunities to grow stronger and learn things than Cherrygrove had. There were just the long, troubling areas called Route 30 and Route 31 that made things difficult. In the future, when people had pokémon on higher levels, they would probably laugh looking back at the difficulties player had now. But at the moment, people still died in those routes.

Viking did not want to die.

The trio of him, Melkor and Fraud had been spending one night in Cherrygrove City and it was currently morning. Viking had hardly left the PokémonCenter at all. Good news were that he was beginning to warm up towards Charmander since Fraud had forced him to keep her out of her pokéball ever since they arrived in town, and that Jigglypuff turned out to be quite the jolly character. Bad news were perhaps that Viking was becoming increasingly aware of that Fraud was looking like a girl now, which made him uneasy around her instead of Charmander.

Somewhere before noon, when Fraud and Viking had been sitting in the PokémonCenter for hours doing nothing more than flipping through their inventories and memorizing attacks and stuff about their pokémon in the in-game menus, Melkor entered and marched up to them with a brisk smile.

"I've been scouting a little and talked to people. There are a lot of players here who partake in practice battles, where you never use all of your pokémon so you can't white out. Let's do that to get stronger!" He held up a clenched fist determinedly as he spoke.

Viking and Fraud threw a glance at one another and then looked back at Melkor. It wasn't like they could refuse when he looked like that.